The Closers

close to the vest to give them the advantage if a prime suspect was ever identified.

Finally Bosch noticed that there were no media interviews with the grieving parents. The Verlorens apparently chose not to hold their loss out for public consumption. Bosch liked that about them. It seemed to him that increasingly the media forced the victims of tragedy to grieve in public, in front of cameras and in newspaper stories. Parents of murdered children became talking heads who appeared on the tube as experts the next time there was another child murdered and another set of parents grieving. It all didn’t sit well with Bosch. It seemed to him that the best way to honor the dead was to keep them close to the heart, not to share them with the world across the electronic spectrum.

At the back of the murder book there was a pocket containing a manila envelope with the Times’s eagle insignia and address in the corner. Bosch pulled it out and opened it and found a series of 8 x 10 color photos taken at Rebecca Verloren’s funeral one week after her murder. Apparently there had been a deal cut, the photos traded for access. Bosch remembered making such deals in the past when he was unable because of scheduling or budget to get a police photographer out to a funeral. He would promise the reporter working the story that he or she would be in line for an exclusive if the newspaper photographer wouldn’t mind running off a complete set of crowd shots of the people attending the service. You never knew when the killer might show up to get a rise out of the anguish and grief he had caused. Reporters always went for the deal. Los Angeles was one of the most competitive media markets in the world and reporters lived and died by the access they had.

Bosch studied the photos but was handicapped in looking for Roland Mackey because he didn’t know what he looked like in 1988. The photos Kiz Rider had pulled up on the computer were from his most recent arrest. They showed a balding man with a goatee and dark eyes. It was hard to trace that visage back to any of the teenaged faces that gathered to put one of their own in the ground.

For a while he studied Becky Verloren’s parents in one of the photos. They were standing at the graveside, leaning against each other as if holding each other from falling. Tears lined their faces. Robert Verloren was black and Muriel Verloren was white. Bosch now understood where their daughter had gotten her growing beauty. The mix of races in a child often rose above the attendant social difficulties to achieve such grace.

Bosch put the photos down and thought for a moment. Nowhere in the murder book had there been mention of the possibility of race playing a part in the murder. But the murder weapon’s coming from the burglary of a man being threatened because of his religion seemed to give rise to the possibility of at least a tenuous link to the murder of a girl of mixed races.

The fact that this was not mentioned in the murder book meant nothing. The aspect of race was always something held close to the vest in the LAPD. To commit something to the paperwork was to make it known within the department-investigative summaries were reviewed all the way up the line on hot cases. It could then be leaked and turned into something else, something political. So its absence was not seen by Bosch as a taint on the investigation. Not yet, at least.

He returned the photos to the envelope and closed the murder book. He guessed that there were more than three hundred pages of documents and photos in it, and nowhere on any of those pages had he seen the name Roland Mackey. Was it possible that he had escaped even peripheral notice in the investigation so many years before? If so, was it still possible he was indeed the killer?

These questions bothered Bosch. He always tried to keep faith in the murder book, meaning that he believed the answers usually lay within its plastic sides. But this time he was having difficulty believing the cold hit. Not the science. He had no doubt about Mackey being matched to the blood and tissue found inside the murder weapon. But he believed something was wrong. Something was missing.

He looked down at his pad. He had taken few notes. He had really only composed a list of people he wanted to talk to.

Green and Garcia

Mother/Father

school/friends/teachers

former boyfriend

probation agent

Mackey-school?

He knew that every note he had taken was obvious. He realized how little they had besides the DNA match, and once again he was uneasy about building a case without anything else.

Bosch was staring at his notes when Kiz Rider walked into the office. She was empty-handed and unsmiling.

“Well?” Bosch asked.

“Bad news. The murder weapon’s gone. I don’t know if you’ve read the whole book but there’s mention of a journal in there. The girl kept a journal. That’s gone, too. Everything’s gone.”

7

THEY DECIDED that the best way to deal with and discuss bad news was to eat. Besides that, nothing made Bosch hungrier than sitting in an office all morning and reading through a murder book. They went over to Chinese Friends, a small place on Broadway at the end of Chinatown where they knew they could still get a table this early. It was a place where you could eat well and to capacity and barely go over five bucks. The trouble was that it filled up fast, mostly with headquarters staff from the Fire Department, the gold badges from Parker Center and the bureaucrats from City Hall. If you didn’t get there by noon you ordered takeout and you had to sit and eat on the bus benches out front in the sun.

They left the murder book in the car so as not to disturb other patrons in the restaurant, where the tables were jammed as close as the desks in a public school. They did bring their notes, and discussed the case in an improvised shorthand designed to keep their conversation private. Rider explained that when she had said the gun and the journal were missing from the ESB what she meant was that no evidence carton from the case could be found during an hour-long search by two evidence clerks. This was not much of a surprise to Bosch. As Pratt had warned earlier, the department had taken haphazard care of evidence for decades. Evidence cartons were booked and filed on shelves in chronological order and without any sort of separation according to crime classification. Consequently, evidence from a murder might sit on a shelf next to evidence from a burglary. And when clerks came through periodically to clear out evidence from cases where the statute of limitations had expired, sometimes the wrong box got tossed. The security of the ESB was also a low priority for many years. It was not difficult for anyone with an LAPD badge to gain access to any piece of evidence in the facility. So the evidence cartons were subject to pilfering. It was not unusual for weapons to be missing, or other kinds of evidence from famous cases like the Black Dahlia, Charles Manson, and the Dollmaker crimes.

There was no indication in the Verloren case of evidence theft. It was probably more a case of carelessness, of trying to find a box that had been stored seventeen years ago in an acre-sized room crowded with matching boxes.

“They’ll find it,” Bosch said. “Maybe you can even get your buddy up on six to put the fear of God into them. Then they’ll find it for sure.”

“They better. The DNA is no good to us without that gun.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Harry, it’s the chain of evidence. You can’t go into trial with the DNA and not be able to show the jury the weapon it came from. We can’t even go into the district attorney’s office without it. They’ll throw us right out on our asses.”

“Look, all I’m saying is, right now we’re the only ones who know we don’t have the gun. We can fake it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you think that this is all going to come down to Mackey and us in a little room? I mean, even if we had the gun in evidence we can’t prove beyond a doubt that he left his blood in it during the shooting of Becky Verloren.